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Catherine Winkworth was born 13 September 1837 in London at 20 Ely Place, Holborn.[1] She was the fourth daughter of Henry Winkworth, a silk merchant. In 1829, her parents moved to Manchester where her father had a silk mill. Winkworth lived most of her early life in Manchester. Winkworth studied under the Unitarian minister, Rev. William Gaskell, minister of Cross Street Chapel, in Manchester, and with the English philosopher Dr. James Martineau. She subsequently moved with the family to Clifton, near Bristol. Her sister Susanna Winkworth (1820–1884) was also a translator, mainly of German devotional works.

She spent a year in Dresden, during which time she took an interest in German hymnody. Around 1854, she published her book Lyra Germanica, a collection of German hymns which she had chosen and translated into English. A further collection followed in 1858. During 1863, she published The Chorale Book for England, which was coedited by the composers William Sterndale Bennett and Otto Goldschmidt, and in 1869 she followed this with Christian Singers of Germany. According to The Harvard University Hymn Book, Winkworth "did more than any other single individual to make the rich heritage of German hymnody available to the English-speaking world."[2] Four examples of translations by her hand are published in The Church Hymn Book 1872 (Nos 344, 431, 664 and 807).[3]

According to the Encyclopedia of Britain by Bamber Gascoigne (1993), it was Catherine Winkworth who, learning of General Charles James Napier's ruthless, unauthorized, and successful campaign to conquer the Indian province of Sindh, "...remarked to her teacher that Napier's despatch to the governor general of India, after capturing Sind, should have been Peccavi (Latin for 'I have sinned': a pun on 'I have Sindh'). She sent her joke to the new humorous magazine Punch, which printed it in 1844. The pun has usually been credited to Napier.[6]